Christ's victory

“Who will remove from our hearts the Law, the handwriting that was against us (Colossians 2 [:14]), or our evil conscience? No human being is able to do this. Indeed, no creature in heaven or earth can take away the evil conscience or sin that the conscience feels. But this is what does it, he says: ‘Thanks be to God, who has given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ’ [1 Cor. 15:57]. We have the victory through Jesus Christ, who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven and was made man, suffered death on the cross for us, descended into hell, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven; destroyed sin, death, and hell in His body; fulfilled the Law perfectly and entirely and stopped its mouth so that it must stop accusing and condemning us. This is the victory: that death has lost its sting. The Law can no longer awaken sin, nor can sin any longer make death strong, for Christ has atoned for our sin and has erased the handwriting, the Law, setting it aside and nailing it to the cross (Colossians 2 [:14])” (LW 58:159).

“For this is the most glorious kind of victory, namely, to pierce the adversary with his own weapon and to slay him with his own sword, as we sing: ‘He fell prostrate on his own darts.’ For in this way God promotes and completes His work by means of an alien deed, and by His wonderful wisdom He compels the devil to work through death nothing else than life, so that in this way, while he acts most of all against the work of God, he acts for the work of God and against his own work with his own deed. For thus he worked death in Christ, but Christ completely swallowed up death in Himself through the immortality of His divinity and rose again in glory” (LW 29:135).